 Welcome to Targeting Putin's Wallets, exploring the impact of sanctions on Russian oligarchs. My name is Candice Rondeau and I'm the director of the Future Frontlines Program at New America. Future Frontlines for those of you who don't know is a program that is trying to level set the conversation about how technology is changing, how we think about power in the global context. A core aim of our program is to tap into the growing movement of journalists, policy analysts, social scientists, computer and information scientists and human rights defenders who are leveraging publicly available data and information to conduct open source investigations on how power and influence is changing and also to hold power to account. And so in that vein, our conversation today about Russia's oligarchy and the new wave of sanctions triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine is extremely apropos. Today also marks the launch of our event series Aftershocks, Russia, Ukraine and the New World Order, which tracks how the world is responding to Russia's military intervention and the conflicts impacts on Ukraine and the region and the global order writ large. For the first event in our series we are also really proud to be partnering with the Atlantic Council's Geoeconomic Center. The center was founded in 2020 with the purpose of addressing the urgent need to restore confidence in the open rules-based system that the US and its allies have championed over the last 75 years. The Geoeconomic Center bridges the divide between the often siloed sectors of economics, finance and foreign policy and serves as a translation hub helping to shape a better global economic future. So before I introduce our panel a little bit of housekeeping, I would just want you to engage with us as we go forward with this series and also today in our conversation. We're on Twitter by using the hashtag, hashtag oligarchs and following at new America and at AC GeoEcon you can be part of the conversation as well. So for the panel, I am pretty psyched about this panel. These are some of my favorite friends and sources when it comes to all things Russia and oligarchy. First we have my dear friend Mike Echoll who is a senior correspondent with the Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty News Service. In addition to being a proud graduate of the Russian Immersion Program Middlebury College where I also studied for a little while Mike has reported extensively on Russia and served for many years as a correspondent for the Associated Press before joining for the RFERL. He's reported on the ground in Russia's invasion of Ukraine in many different iterations over time as the war has gone on. He's reported in Chechnya, he's reported in Georgia. He was there for the 2004 Beslan hostage crisis and also reported on the annexation of Crimea in 2014. There are really few American reporters that I know of who could match his knowledge of Russia and the wider European and Eurasian region. So we're really pleased to welcome Mike to join us today. We also have with us Luke Harding who is a foreign correspondent with The Guardian and author of Shadow State, Murder, Mayhem and Russia's Remaking of the West. Luke served as correspondent in Russia for The Guardian from 2007 to 2011 for his sharp and critical reporting on the intersection of Russia's mafia culture and the Russian state and the Kremlin power politics earned him the status of persona non grata for a little while and it also generated a lot of buzz and attention for one of his first books, Mafia State. Luke also brings a lot to the table when it comes to a conversation about the Russian oligarchy and we're pleased to have him with us today. And last but not least, my favorite all-time source on all things sanctions, Brian O'Toole, who is a non-resident senior fellow with the Geoeconomic Center at the Atlantic Council, our partners on this series today. And in addition to being a really accomplished expert on sanctions, he also happens to be one of the few people in Washington who can make arcane topics like asset freezes and travel ban sound exciting and fun. So we're really pleased to have him. He served previously before his current position as senior vice president at Truist Financial Corporation. He served with the US Department of Treasury and senior advisor to the director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, otherwise known as OFAC here in Washington where he helped manage the implementation of all OFAC administered economic and financial sanctions programs. He also played a very pivotal role in designing the US sanctions regime in response to Russia's aggression in Ukraine and negotiating the multilateral sanctions imposed by the European Union and G7 coordination with the United States. So we're really pleased to have Brian, Luke, and Mike with us today. Let's jump into the conversation. Let me just also remind the audience that we'll get to Q and A about 40 minutes into the conversation. If you've got questions, please do drop them in that Slido box on the right of the screen and we will happily take those up. So let me just sort of scene set here. We have seen unprecedented sanctions lobbied against Russia over the last six weeks. It's been almost kind of a thunderclap for the world economy. And whatever the positioning that the Kremlin may have on it, it is pretty clear that not only Russian institutions and organizations are affected by these changes and these sanctions, but individuals, very wealthy, powerful individuals who many assume have ties to Putin and or the Kremlin and have a pivotal role in shaping not only Russia's economy, but also it's political economy. So the question I think I have and I think a lot of our audience probably have is what is new and different about this approach in terms of targeting wealthy Russians, Brian? Yeah, I mean, it has been a remarkable six weeks and you make a joke about making sanctions. Sounds interesting. I never thought I'd be hearing huge media outlets like NPR and CBS talking about full blocking sanctions and the distinction between that and before it's just remarkable. I think, look, the approach to going after Putin's wallets, the oligarchs, whatever you wanna call them dates back to 2014 and to a certain degree even before, right? There was a, at least a policy acknowledgement that you can impose pressure on Putin unless you go after the people who were hiding money for him. You know, there's been a, I think one of the challenges that we kind of wrestled with in 2014 and I think is certainly present today is what's the use, right? Are you going to get any effect beyond denying those mass sets if you can do that for money that's frozen in the West? And I think in 2014, there was a strain of thought that went through the essential logic of, well, look, these are very rich, powerful people. They hold Putin's wealth. Some of them, others are magnets in Russian business and they must have power of their own and if they don't wanna lose their money, they might start trying to moderate Putin's actions as head of state. I, you know, there has not been any real evidence that that has happened. I think maybe if you had done this in 2005, there might have been a little bit more kind of credence to that policy goal. 2014, maybe it was a little muddy as to whether that was viable as a goal or not. I think today it's pretty clear that, especially with the increasingly small circular advisors Putin relies on, basically the Sylviki is his knuckle draggers in the intelligence services that, you know, that's not really an outcome that anybody can truly hope for. Doesn't mean they're not legitimate. Doesn't mean that these sanctions shouldn't happen, the point of the sanctions right now as Biden laid out at the outset of this sanctions kind of blitz or a thunderclap as you called it is to isolate Russia, make it a pariah on the level stage. You can't do that and exempt the people who have stolen money left and right, who would have made money in both legitimate ways and illegitimate ways for a lot of these rich, you know, Russian wallets or oligarchs. And, you know, it is simply not credible as a sanction strategy to say we're going to isolate Russia's economy, but we're going to let all these guys who were ultra wealthy get off Scott fruit. Just that logic doesn't hold. And so to me, that's kind of what the policy is now is it's isolation of them from the global economy as much as anything else. So isn't it also that I'm going to ask Mike this question but because we've debated this for a couple of years now, it's also interesting to kind of reframe the policy objective, you know, move it from influencing Putin to do X, Y or Z or, you know, to change his approach to something. But the reality is there, you know, these many of these oligarchs have been an important pressure release valve for the Kremlin in terms of pushing funding into places where it can be hidden away, right? From much larger kind of corporately oriented sanctions. And we know that Putin's wallets, you know, we use that term because this is the strategy has been also to hide his assets and the assets of the state in these rather discreet accounts owned by these oligarchs. Mike, you have some thoughts on this, I'm sure. Well, that's a good question. And the first thought that comes to mind is the news that came out this week about the individuals being sanctioned, namely Putin's adult daughters, which was the headline for us and I'm sure for the Guardian and for many other papers around the world. Not only did we get sort of formal acknowledgement that these two adult women who have been in and out of the public view for years were his daughters, but the intention is, or the implication is that there's money being hidden allegedly from Putin and his inner circle via his family members. And I think that speaks to what you're talking about, Candice, about, you know, where these flows, these illicit flows are going, that's not necessarily the traditional oligarchs. It's non-traditional avenues, I guess. Remember several years back, I think it was after the, was it the Panama Papers when we heard about, the world heard about the most famous cellist in the world. He was a cellist, right, Luke? Raul Dugan? You might be on mute, Luke. And I think Yo-Yo Ma was still the most famous, Mike. Yeah. I'm so sorry, I was just like, Mike, I found him. That's all, I second Raul Dugan, yeah. There we go. So Raul Dugan, those revelations, again, they were eye-popping for many reasons, but the revelations talked about how Raul Dugan allegedly, allegedly was a conduit for some of this money being scrolled away in weird locales in Europe or otherwise. So, you know, the question about whether now we're seeing these pressure release vows being cut off for Putin's money is an interesting one. I'll have to think more about that. You know, the overall question, the larger question of whether money is being either cut off from the Kremlin and Putin's inner circle or whether money is even returning to Russia, being repatriated, that's a separate discussion we could have. It's an interesting one. And I think it's still too early to say, and we're only six weeks into this thunderclap round of sanctions. And there's still a whole lot we don't know, economically, fiscally, how this is all gonna play out. You know, is the Russian economy gonna crater this year because of the sanctions quite possibly? Is inflation really gonna run at 200% as I think I heard the White House say the other day quite possibly? So I'll turn that over to Luke, pass the baton to Luke to talk about where I'll do again or others, perhaps. Yeah, no, thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks, Mike. I mean, I just, in terms of the, just to be clear, by the way, I'm speaking to you from Lviv in Ukraine, where I've been reporting in fact, where I've met Mike before the invasion, which feels like quite a long time ago. But in terms of Russia, I would say there were sort of two big projects going on. One is the kind of noisy, aggressive revisionist, sort of imperialist project that we're seeing unfolding. We've seen unfolding since February the 24th of conquest, of the subjugation of Ukraine, of the annihilation, actually of Ukrainians and the destruction of cities from Mariupol to Kharkiv to Kiev, to Kiev Oblast and region. But the other project that we're talking about today is stealing. And that's been the other driver, the other vector, which for much of the Putin period, I would say has been more important than the nationalism, has just been this sort of business of essentially taking over state assets, milking them and hiding this money in a sort of series of off shores. And Putin and the people around him, they're all billionaires. And there's a kind of myth that fairly early on in his presidency, during his first presidential term, that he summoned all the oligarchs around the table and basically told them to behave stare to politics or they'd lose their fortunes, that he was some kind of anti-oligarch. In fact, he's not, he's an uber oligarch. All he did was to redistribute state assets away from some oligarchs towards his friends, most of whom were from the KGB or the FSB, the successor spy agency. And it's an oligarchic system. And the key point to understand when you're trying to conceptualize sanctions is that these oligarchs are not they're not like kind of brilliant American tycoons or businessmen. They're not Elon Musk's or Bill Gates. Well, some of them are quite talented and clever and so on and good at business, but essentially they are informal state functionaries, emissaries whose fortunes, whose survival in a very existential way depends on good relations with the Kremlin. And if they fall out, they can run away, bad things can happen. So whether sanctions lead to regime change, lead to Putin being deposed, I think it's an unlikely scenario is irrelevant. The point is that they're the right thing to do. They're the moral thing to do. And they're the best asymmetric weapon that I think the US can do in this situation as well, obviously, is arming the government of Lodomir Zelensky. So, I think they're very effective. I mean, I think that, and I'd like to throw this back to my sort of co-panelists. I mean, the question is, why so late? I mean, the nature of this regime, you know, I wrote a book, Candice was saying, mafia state has been obvious to a lot of people, to a lot of commentators, you know, myself, but also Gary Kasparov and Applebaum, many, many others. And yet political leaders have largely ignored this pattern of egregious behavior and doubling down by Vladimir Putin over a period of years. And it's only now when we have the cataclysm of Ukraine that the world is sort of sanctioning up and imposing a financial cost on Russia. And what the Ukrainians say, you talk to people from the Zelensky government is that we warned you, we warned you, warned you. If you had done this earlier, that might have avoided invasion. Now, I think probably it wouldn't have done, but it's a strong argument. And I'm just curious, I mean, the US has done sanctions for sure, but nothing on the scale. Why was this not done sooner? And that's such a good question. In fact, that goes back to Brian's point about, maybe this should have been 2005 or Mike, I think you were also sort of alluding to this idea. You should have moved earlier. I think your take, Luke, if I may, you know, take the chair's prerogative on the role and the function of the oligarchs is really right on. I mean, they are not Elon Musk, they are not Bill Gates, you know, and they are kind of like the plenipotentiaries of the Ministry of Funny Russian Walks. You know, if Monty Python was gonna do like, you know, a follow-up series on this particular period, that's what they would be called. And you know, one of our favorites, of course, is if you have Gany Progausion, or at least one of my favorites, I mean, he knows that, he's one of my favorites. But he's a very good example. I think there are others, Victor Bechselberg, you know, maybe some of these other new ones, and Konstantin Malofaev now just being indicted, be very interested to see the discovery on that, even though that it's stemming from old charges, I imagine that there's some innovation, some legal jurisdiction questions there, but also some innovation on the part of the Department of Justice. So that does raise this question, one, Brian, let me turn to you on that. Why did it take so long? And now that it's happened, what can we expect kind of near term and then long term in terms of the impact on the oligarchy itself? Yeah, you know, it's a fascinating question. I'm not sure there's any like great answers. I think Luke has fought on in talking about the role. I'm fond of saying, you know, we used to talk a lot about, you know, Russian organized crime in the 90s and how some of these guys used to be part of those circles, but now the state crowded out organized crime from, you know, if you take like the economic term, they crowded out organized crime. And so, you know, there's still like drug runners and stuff, but they're not controlling strategic industries the way they did in 1996. We're shooting each other the street for that matter. You know, but in terms of like why, not until now, I mean, honestly, I think it's, there was a serious hangover in the West, long-term one, that wanted to integrate Russia into the global economy and this thought, you know, it goes back to the idea that, you know, nations with McDonald's don't go to war with each other. You know, all these kind of theories about how trade, trade normalizes relations and drives these processes forward. And I think we were just fundamentally as the West slow on the uptake to understand this is not what Putin's goal is. And we were slow to realize what his goals were. You know, there were successive administrations that tried to resets President Bush, looked deep into Putin's eyes and saw his soul, right? Like those are people who want to integrate Russia because they believe that the Russian people are going to be better off with Western trade and values and all those things. But, you know, fundamentally, I think are, are, you know, kind of the first warning should have been Grossman, honestly, in 1999, but after that, it should have been the invasion of Georgia, which took place, you know, just in some ways at the wrong times, turnover of administrations and everybody lost focus. You know, governments have attention spans. They do. It's the way it works. And so I think, I think honestly, that's what it was. People were slow to really grasp what Putin's goals were. You know, and there were too many excuses made along the way with good intentions, right? Intentions of helping the Russian people, the Russian economy and integrating Russia. But too many excuses made along the way for Putin's behavior. And the near term effect, any ideas about that? Any thoughts about sort of what we might see, maybe six months from now or toward the end of this calendar year? Yeah, I mean, I think, honestly, the hope needs to be against a reversion to that, right? I think, you know, 2014 started down this path, but, you know, and we should have understood this in Syria earlier than that too, but, you know, I think the thing that the West needs to guard against is a reversion to, oh, well, we should just reintegrate Russia because it's better for the global economy. It's better for Russia and Russians and understand that, you know, the Kremlin and its functionaries, which extend to a huge portion of the economy, this is not acceptable behavior. They have pillaged Russia. They have abused the West. They are Putin's fundamental goal is to undermine Western democratic norms and institutions and Western democracy as a governing kind of principle, while at the same time he's getting rich off, right? Those are things that don't square and they're not changing regardless of whether troops get pulled back or they only go from the compass. I think that's the lens everybody has to bear in mind here and be careful against people aren't being killed all the time so we can have some sort of reversion to more. I think that's gonna be a tendency in some places and that's where everybody needs to be careful. So the magic elixir of neoliberal economics didn't work. I mean, I think one of the implications of, you know, these aftershocks is this real paradigm shift in our understanding of whether or not the medicine, A of shock therapy, right? And then B of kind of, you know, let's embrace and let's integrate these state capitalist autocracies like Russia, like China. Let's see if we can digest that giant elephant. And it turns out we can't. So Mike, what do you think is gonna happen in your term? Boy, shock therapy. Well, you're going way back with that comment. Always about the old school. Always about the old school. Boy, we get people have great dissertations and have endless discussions about what went wrong. In the nineties and did the West grew up with shock therapy and the Yeltsin years. That's not the goal of this webinar. I mean, in the near future, we're already seeing trend lines. We're seeing this, you know, in terms of like public, well, so one thing, and this is because I was writing about this issue today, I was writing about public sentiment, public polling in Russia and what Russian society is feeling, and how they're viewing Putin and the war in Ukraine, the special military operation in Ukraine, excuse me. And we are seeing a bit of a rally around the flag phenomenon going on in Russia. And that's playing out in some of the polling. It's unclear whether that's sustainable. And in particular, whether it's unclear whether it's sustainable as the economic after shocks or ripples of the sanctions really sort of take hold and take hold over the next, the coming quarters. I think by this fall, it'll be really interesting. By the fall, it'll be very interesting to see what happens in terms of, will there be shortages of food, stuffs, medicines, will inflation indeed be rampant by that time as the White House is predicting? Will we see mass layoffs? We're already seeing that at some industrial giants, automobile manufacturers, often of us, I believe is one great example. So we'll have to see how that ripples through the economy. And I think by the fall, assuming everything stays in place and assuming the war is still continuing, these are big ifs, but the fall will be a critical moment to see how these economic measures play out. And in terms of the oligarchs, I think we're already, Brian I think alluded to this, we're seeing this closing of the circle of counselors that are actually able to have Putin's ear and give him guidance on the conduct of the war in relations with the West. And there's ample reporting, intelligence and speculation that he's been getting bad counsel from his closest advisors who are not the oligarchs per se in the traditional sense of the word, they're the Silo Vicky, they're the Bortnikov-Patrushev Shorigu Defense Minister, FSB Chief Security Council. They're not Anatoly Chubais, one of the original oligarchs who as many people in his call know, apparently fled to Russia last week or the week before and was seen withdrawing cash from an ATM in Istanbul. Chubais does not have Putin's ear and has not had his ear for a while. And that's I think a danger because if conventional wisdom is to be believed, Chubais was conceivably a moderating influence, a moderating source of counsel for Putin. And the lack of those moderating voices, I think bodes poorly for the conduct of the war, but also for this reversion to a potential or Soviet police state that we're seeing. So there's also that interfactionalism, I think we're also starting to see come to the poor as you're just alluding to in a way. Chubais, the stage that means that Medvedev, for whatever he's worth is a little bit more isolated in some ways. There are others who are going to lose their political anchors as the oligarchs start to be unable to grease the wheels, I think. What do you think about that, Luke? Well, it's funny you mentioned Medvedev. I was just raising a rise smile. I was in Moscow as Guardian Bureau Chief when Medvedev was president of Russia and Putin was Prime Minister. And the joke going around Moscow in those days was that there was a distinct Medvedev camp in the Kremlin, which was supposedly more liberal, but it wasn't clear whether Medvedev was in the Medvedev camp. That's right. The thing is, he's turned into this kind of ridiculous, sort of hardliner who's trying to out Putin and Putin with his statements about the Ukrainians being vassals and there's no point in talking to them. We only have to talk to the Cezarean, which is you guys, it's the Americans. But what I wanted to say was I just wanted to say something about the way that you'll talk of economic progress and how that's all been undone, unraveled, 25 years of integration with the West has gone with this thundercloud. And I do think there's been another sort of problem in sort of Western analysis of Putin's mental universe. And it's a very strange place. And Mike's written pieces about criminology before and so have I. And in a way, you don't want to kind of peer too deep, but what's clear is that the Russians in general, by which I mean the elite and Putin in particular, do not think, as one British civil servant told me, the way we think they should think, that they think completely differently. And I was sitting in Kiev ahead of the invasion, really convinced that Putin was gonna do it. And a lot of people were saying, no, he can't, it's irrational, think of the sanctions and the consequences, there would be terrible, the economy would suffer, people would suffer. And actually it turns out that Putin has been sitting on his own in his bunker for two years, seeing almost no one brooding about Russia's imperial destiny and his great niche and role in it. And he's been reading history. He's been reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He's been reading the chronicles of a bygone age about medieval Kievan roots. He's been thinking about Saint Vladimir who founded Kiev back in the 10th century and that maybe he can be a new Saint Vladimir reclaiming and reuniting historical lands. And he's not thinking about neoliberalism. He's not thinking about, oh gosh, we might lose McDonald's or American sanctions. He's in this kind of misty, romantic, grand historical fantasy where basically he's Prince Vladimir or Nicholas I, with a bit of Solzhenitsyn thrown in. And because he's in this strange space, this strange unreachable space, it means that any kind of rational economic consideration goes out the window. And just one final point, which is that he has a kind of great narrative, a counter-narrative to all this, which is to say, I always told you the West was out to get us. We were surrounded by hostile enemies led by the Globny Protivnik, the main enemy, America, as in KGB times. And look, I've been proved right. They've done all these beastly, nasty, terrible things to us because they hate us and they want to stop us from being great again. Therefore, we have to defend ourselves from this hegemonistic attack by the U.S. and its satellites, which by the way includes my country, Great Britain, or not so Great Britain as I now regard it. And so basically, we should do these things, but I don't think there will change Putin's behavior. They won't change the way he thinks about the world, which is extremely strange. And just very last point, when I go out and get coffee and talk to Ukrainian refugees in Lviv, I say, look, how can this thing end? And they all say one thing, and it's very simple, they just say, we need to kill Putin. And I think when Putin is dead, this war will stop and probably these sanctions will begin to ease. I shouldn't laugh. I mean, I don't mean to be slipped in, but I hear that a lot too. I mean, I hear that at the kitchen table, when I go home to see family. I think this is the conversation. People are kind of starting to recognize that he is an obstacle, but I want to also comment on your point. Your description of Putin reminds me a little bit of a show, a movie, a very old movie. I'm dating myself a little bit. Flash Gordon and like how Ming, who was like this evil villain, he just really thought he was like the czar of space. You know, like really, this is totally true. You're also reminding me about this long running kind of historical framing of Russian leadership generally amongst political elites. And also the idea of what is morally right and what is ethically right, being so diametrically opposed to how so many in the US and Europe and the UK kind of frame what is morally right and what is ethical. And it reminds me of a guy named Vladimir Lefebvre, who wrote very famously a theoretical sort of proposition looking at the long running rivalry between Russia and the United States and the different algebra of conscience as a name of the book that we each apply when we're kind of looking at what is wrong, what is right, what is just leadership, what is, you know, moral leadership. And I think it's totally right that Putin operates in a world and in a tradition that is quite diametrically opposed to that of the United States certainly and that of Europe and the UK. And so to expect him then to respond to things that we think are morally right is probably a little bit unrealistic. But Brian, let me turn to you on this question of now kind of the reaction that we're seeing from some of these older blacks because we've seen different folks being asked, well, aren't you sorry though that you've been in league with Putin for so long and now that you're being punished and your yachts being taken away, what do you think Mr. Mikhail Friedman, what do you think you should be doing? What do you think about that, Brian? Yeah, I mean, you know, they run into the same problem that pollsters do, right? Where it's, you know, they're not gonna give a truthful public answer about any of that. I'm sure a lot of them are furious privately. You know, this whole conversation about like morality and where Putin is thinking diametrically opposed to the West is all very relevant, I think for how people need to conceive of this, the points from being frank that I tried to get across to Russians and others who were talking about these things ahead of the invasion, you know, saying, look, all these guys around Putin, they don't care, they just wanna go back to the USSR. They think they can export wheat and energy and they're gonna be fine. And I kept telling them, that's crazy because you don't understand the way that the economy works globally. Now, nobody's flying planes of cash around to settle up transactions or anything like that anymore now. All of it comes through New York. And so fundamentally, you are going to turn Russia into an autarky if they go down this path. And I think, you know, sitting aside where the Putin cares about economics or not and economic growth, I think the fundamental question in my mind about all of this, and this is a roundabout way of getting to your question on the oligarchs is, you know, there are substitution effects that have to take place, right? They are taking all of their FX earnings from energy sales, plugging it into the market to prop up the value of the ruble. The ruble spread overseas is, you know, it's dramatic compared to what it is at home. I mean, it's just like almost inconceivable spreads for a buy-sell. And what that means though, is they're not spending that money on what they want to spend it on, right? Presumably, some of the graft that would be happening is not able to happen because Putin needs that money to either fuel a war effort to prop up the economy so there's not this complete and utter collapse. And they're certainly, you know, almost certainly not reinvesting in their energy infrastructure, which has been as well, you know, historically can tell everybody is really terrible. So, you know, these things are eroding over time. I think that's where this is going to get interesting is, you know, whether or not somebody assassinates Putin, or he's not a young guy and setting aside the fact that these dictators like Mugabe tend to live until they're, you know, a million years old, you know, he's going to be out of power at some point. And I do think that the cracking of that base of the kleptocratic system, which I think is happening, is going to have a huge impact, whether the oligarchs will say it publicly or not, right, if they can't generate the same amount of wealth as you talked about, they're not going to be greasing skits. And I think, you know, they're not going to publicly break with Putin because then they're going to turn into Horkovsky. You know, we saw, what's his name, the guy who won the Nets for a couple of years, the basketball team in New York. Yeah, Brokerov, he made some noises about politics and then quickly back down after Putin freaked out, right? Like they're not going to go down that route, but there's going to be some stuff that starts to happen. I suspect behind closed doors. And that's all going to be very interesting because at some point Putin's not going to be in power. And whoever the heck takes that place atop the throne is going to have a heck of a job consolidating power inside of Russia, let alone trying to manage all these external misadventures that Putin's gotten into. And at that point, I think it's when the sanctions become very useful because trading sanctions relief for getting the heck out of Syria, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, that may be very attractive to whoever that person is. So that, I mean, are we going to go, it sounds to me like we might be headed back for like another Manditsky-Peter, like back to the old, let's see who rise to the top of the mafia heap. What do you think, Mike? Well, that's an interesting question. Back in a calmer quaint your time, us Russian reporters were writing about the Duma election and about the presidential election and the constitutional amendments. Remember, there was all this discussion about whether Putin would stay in power, how you do it and that's still a relevant conversation, though clearly that's dropped down the order of priorities these days. But at the time that we were writing about this issue, there is the whole discussion about, is there a succession plan? Is there a lame duck? Is there a rival waiting in the wings? Is there another medvedev type of anointed successor who's going to pop onto the scene? We didn't see any of that. We saw, of course, the stage-managed choreographed referendum for the constitutional amendments then we had the Duma election. And so, but the thinking at the time was, the minute that Putin shows any sort of inkling that he's on his way out the door, that there's going to be all this mad scramble among the rival clans and power bases within the Kremlin and within the wider, secondary tertiary circles around him. And the thinking was that that's why we didn't see any of that. And that the Kremlin was keeping the cards very close to its chest in terms of Putin's plans for the coming presidential election. Now we have a war on our hands and everything is scrambled. The oligarchs are returning home to roost. Putin's ear is taken up by the Siloviki and it's even, and he's supposed to be up for election. His term is supposed to come due in two years if I'm not mistaken. So, the whole deck has been shuffled and it's a really interesting period of time notwithstanding the fact that the economy is about to collapse and Russians are going to start hearing more about body bags and soldiers coming home, paratroopers being buried in school for Krasnodar. And that's gonna have a long-term knock on effect I think on these discussions in Moscow. I wanted to say something else about, you were talking about the difference between Putin and how he's different than the West. And I think it comes down to how the Kremlin has historically seen the state, the role of the Russian state. It's a very different relationship than the state that you and I, Candace, have with our government or in the UK for that matter, in a democratic system. And Russia, the state is the paramount creation and Putin exists as the state. He is the state. It's almost like a Le Toit Simois kind of situation. And everything he does is for the greater good of the state and the Russian people serve the state and that's the relationship there. And the oligarchs are in that same position at least historically. And we've heard that from many oligarchs talking about how they're allowed to make money as long as they don't meddle in politics, a la Khorkovsky. And a lot of the participants in the chat today will recall the words that Piotr Avin said back when he was speaking to Robert Mueller, the special counsel back in the fallout from the 2016 presidential election. And Avin was asked specifically about Mueller, excuse me, Avin was asked by Mueller about this relationship between oligarchs and Putin. And he said that the oligarchs took these meetings very seriously and they understood that any suggestions or critiques that Putin made during these meetings were implicit directives. And that's the takeaway from that report and that something that everyone should take away from any discussion about oligarchs today is implicit directives because that's the relationship that defines the relationship between the oligarch and the Kremlin and Putin. And we're seeing that implicit directive guidance shaken now because of the war and now because of the thunderclap of sanctions. But the fact remains that the people who used to be able to guide Putin and offer counter counsel like the Chewbys is like the Avin, like the Freedmen's are no longer able to get in there in the same way that they were. And so, I mean, there's a lot of uncertainty in that regard. Go ahead. Yeah, I was just gonna say one last thing, which is that I do think the subject of private Russian elite conversations is endlessly fascinating. I mean, you read the New York Times, Washington Post, you get these sort of great graphic, well-reported stories about what's happening on Ukraine and the ground and so on. But what we're missing is what are people saying to each other in Moscow? And the problem is that you can't really do that journalistically. I mean, maybe if there's some super spy in the Kremlin, we'll find that in 20 years time or maybe the CIA, no, I suspect they don't. I mean, the only way to do it is almost novelistically. I mean, you can imagine it. You can imagine these conversations. And what we do know from some leaks is that there is enormous sort of cadre turmoil that Putin has placed, for example, the head of the fifth service of the FSB, which is responsible for foreign intelligence and told him that Ukrainians were gonna rise up and greet their Russian liberators with flowers and kisses. And it turns out they greeted them with anti-tank missiles and javelins instead. So they are under house arrest. There are rumors that he's dissatisfied with the head of the SVR foreign intelligence with Sergei Nerechkin, whom he balled out at the famous security council, meeting three days for the invasion. And you can imagine these oligarchs whose yachts, villas have been impounded, whose fortunes have evaporated, whose bank cards don't work anymore are pretty annoyed by this. Whether this blows back into some kind of political change, I don't know, certainly not immediately, but I think there's the biggest turmoil going on in Russia since the Soviet Union 30 years ago. And just one final, slightly gloomy idea I was talking to a sort of very senior Ukrainian government official today who was saying, you know, the Russians feel they have to win this. If they do not prevail in Ukraine, the Russian state falls. So if it's going bad on the battlefield, expect them to do anything to win this war. Existential, totally existential. Luke, thank you for joining us from the field. We'll see you again. Don't leave, folks, we're still talking. Actually, let me, since now we've got about 15 minutes here and I know I see a ton of questions in our queue. So let me turn to some of those. And I think this one, this very first one is actually a very good one. Kind of dovetails and something I wanted to ask you. You know, we have now these kleptocracy task forces one stood up here domestically that has joint jurisdictions and agencies all working together. And then this multilateral task force where there's going to be a lot of intelligence sharing and information sharing and hopefully cooperation. So are there any remaining sanctions on the table at this point that, you know, the US or others in the coalition need to be thinking about trying out? And I will just add to that, you know, given what we know about, you know, hashtag Yacht Watch which has been fascinating, you know, all the different lovely beautiful boats that have been seized or at least stung in various ports. And then the other day, I think there's some art coming from Finland that has been held that was due into St. Petersburg. So, I mean, there's been a lot of very creative thinking but is there more creative thinking on sanctions against oligarchs or other sections of the Russian economy, Brian, that we should be thinking about? Yeah, I mean, look, I think the odds are kind of tacky myself, but, you know, my take on this is maybe a little bit different than some others have. I fundamentally don't think that at least in the short term that oligarch sanctions matter. You know, at least from like an economic perspective and what they're doing, right? What they did to the central bank, the G7 is just so dramatically different than much in, you know, substantially more impactful than even seizing a $600 million bond, right? That's flashy, it helps for public messaging and things like that. So it's not entirely useless. But, you know, for people who are getting bent out of shape about whether the U.S. has done oligarch acts, you know, Friedman or, you know, Avin and the EU had, you know, the U.S. hasn't done them, the EU has, UK has. I think that's a longer term problem to manage. I would expect that there is some stabilization and normalization across that, right? Over time, and I do think that it's important to get those things kind of equal, unequal footing between the U.S., UK and European Union. But I think fundamentally the sanctions that are out there that remain that are impactful are energy sanctions. They're going after the Russian capital markets themselves. They're going after kind of squaring off the rest of the Russian banking sector, right? Gazprom Bank is sanctioned in the UK. That's probably the last really big ticket item remaining in the banking world until maybe the U.S. and Europe decide to pull their Western banks out because those are also pretty big in Moscow. You know, there's things like the new investment ban the U.S. just put out. Yesterday, that's a big deal, but an even bigger deal is a full financial embargo. That's where you start getting the kind of big impacts that gets you towards where Russia is, Iran or North Korea. And oligarch sanctions are important, but they don't get you then. And so I do think you'll see oligarchs rolled out alongside other sanctions packages because there's a clear preference for a drumbeat of sanctions from the West. It's going to happen every week. It's going to happen sometimes twice or three times a week. But realistically, right? Like seizing a yacht makes a pretty picture, but it doesn't really do much for bailing out Russian banks or going after Alpha Bank, which the U.S. did yesterday. Those are just very, very different things. The yacht doesn't have a reverberation across the Russian economy. Blocking Alpha Bank takes out everybody who uses Alpha Bank in the country from the ability to conduct essentially all cross-border transactions for most of them. But there are some counterintuitive asset classes, I think we've encountered that people might not be thinking about, but go ahead, jump in. Well, I was going to say a counterintuitive thought that the yachts, yeah, they might be flashy and they might not have the same sort of substance as like this going up to Spare to Bank or Alpha Bank, but there is a naming and shaming is an important tool in this as well. And as a person, as a journalist and investigator who researches corporate databases and court records and tries to trace all this stuff and beneficial ownership, having that information out there so that people like my organization or the Bellingcats or the other can follow the money trail and publish, expose, reveal where this money is. I think that's a very important thing. Again, it may not have the same sort of oomph that sanctioning Spare to Bank or freezing and Friedman's assets might have, but I think it's an important tool in this discussion. I think that's exactly right. Because when we talked about this a little bit before we got on the phone or on the call itself, sometimes symbols matter, right? And it's a hell of a lot easier to explain a yacht, this big $600 million yacht being seized, whatever Dexel Burns was or you know, those things are easy and clear explanations of what the sanctions impact is, whereas I referenced the rule spread earlier in this discussion. And there's just not that many people around the world who care about that or kind of fundamentally understand why it makes a difference. And it's really hard to explain that to people. So it does matter to have those yachts, seems to, because it provides some of that comfort that the West is taking action, right? We're not just watching Russia killing Ukrainians and discriminating. Yeah, so I mean, it's interesting to think about like sort of the visual impact of these yachts, of course being seized. I do think that there's some other interesting questions here that are kind of related to this and you just alluded to that, Mike, kind of the need to provide transparency on ownership. And so now with these kleptocracy task forces, it will be very interesting to see, can they get beyond these flashy announcements? And what kind of information, when you imagine the information you don't have right now that would create more transparency and more naming and shaving being much more effective, what do you have in mind? Boy, you know, the beneficial ownership. I mean, where's the owner of the company that owns the company, that owns the company, that owns the company? I mean, it takes so much time to dig through this stuff and people like yourself and Brian, I mean, they understand how much effort this takes, but I mean, you really spend your days going down these rabbit holes to find out where these companies are and where the jurisdictions are and I know that there are discussions about improving beneficiary ownership, transparency in Europe and in the US to some degree, but that's a powerful tool when you're talking about trying to hit a pressure point to affect change for oligarchs who may then be able to translate that change back in Moscow. Ken, as you asked about other asset classes that people should be looking at, there was discussion, I think, briefly from Brian about art, artwork being a problematic industry for many, many years and used to either launder funds or to hide away funds in offshore locations. Cryptocurrencies, I think, are already a huge problem or issue and I'm aware that I think the Biden administration has already signaled that that's going to be a priority and I think if I had to guess, I'd say they're probably behind the ball in this regard. The Russians have embraced cryptocurrency both officially and unofficially for many years and the best example of that is the fact that in one of the Mueller indictments of the GRU agents charged with interfering in the presidential election, there were Bitcoin addresses that were included in the indictment that showed how the GRU was using money to using cryptocurrency wallets to transfer money to perform these meddling actions. So the point being is I think cryptocurrency is an asset class that needs to be looked at hard and aggressively and more aggressively than I think has been known certainly in Washington. Yeah, I mean, I know that Senator Elizabeth Warren has been talking about this in Congress along with a couple of other Congress folks in terms of cutting off that cryptocurrency avenue, finding ways to make it a much more transparent industry generally in getting fidelity and due diligence on, you know, know your clients, right? Know your patron, know who it is you're dealing with. I think that's gonna be really, really important. There's another question here from I think our colleague Celia and I think this is a good one. I'll just put a little bit of a spin on it. She asked, what is the role, what is the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in influencing Putin? And here I would just add just because we know about certain characters, certain oligarchs like Konstantin Moloveev, who has used his relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church, prelates and power burkers to kind of judge up his profile, but also I suspect that's been a very interesting avenue for laundering both reputation and money. Mike, do you want to speak to that first and then I'll get to Brian? It's a good question. And I think much more investigation needs to be done in this regard. In terms of reputation, I'm without question. And the Kremlin, and of course, I mean, this is a historical fact, the relationship between the Russian Church and the Kremlin going back hundreds of years. But more recently, Putin has made his embrace of the church, a central part of his political persona, and the church has been happy to return the favor in terms of whatever blessing projects, promulgating various sorts of philosophical notions that feed into Putin's ideas about, you know, Novorossiya and Russian greatness and the spiritual foundations of the Russian people. So, you know, I'm not telling anyone here anything they don't already know that the Kremlin and the Russian Church are very much intertwined. And in terms of the finances of the church, I mean, it's a hugely wealthy church and there are assets, I'm sure, squirreled away in places around the world. It's definitely an area that needs to be investigated more. Huge black box. What do you think, Brian? Yeah, I mean, you know, look, you guys know much more about the Russian Orthodox Church than I do. I mean, I think, but I would echo the point that the investigation needs to happen, right? I mean, there was the famous incident with Peter Carrillo a number of years ago wearing an $80,000 or $100,000 watch, right? That was pretty obvious. And, you know, if we look at our own kind of Western religious orthodoxy, the IOW, the Institute for Religious Works, the Vatican Bank was brought up on money laundering charges, right? So, you know, it's not as if that stuff is completely foreign in this world. So it's, it probably wouldn't be inappropriate to think of that as another kind of oligarchish power center in some respects. I mean, not to kind of defend religious sensibilities or anything like that, you know, it's when you start to peel away from religion and into money laundering and other enabling of corruption, it becomes a very different story. So, I mean, now you're kind of broaching just this last question. We have just a few more minutes. So I'll come to you quickly and just say the ripple effects on other oligarchies. This is the thing that for me, I'm really curious to see example. We know that there are lots of folks in some of the Gulf States, Qatar, UAE who have been dealing very closely and have partnerships, very engaged active partnerships with a lot of these Russian oligarchs, you know, Igor Sechin. I mean, the heads of these large energy companies and large military industrial complex companies have been very deeply entrenched in building their own bridges with other oligarchies in other countries. And I just wonder if you have any thoughts about, you know, where we should expect to see those ripple effects, what that might mean for some other kind of near autocracies that the United States has often called friends and partners. I would say Brian probably has a lot to say about this, but I would say without question, we're already seeing how oligarch assets are being shifted to less transparent jurisdictions out of Europe. And, you know, into places like the Gulf region, that's I think gonna only crease many times over in the coming months and years. You know, I mean, the other thought you're talking about oligarchy more general is just, I mean, the larger problem of oligarchs and their relationship to States, not only the Gulf, I mean, Ukraine has a problem with oligarchs. Let's not forget the country's been hampered by its oligarchs. Maybe to a much greater extent than in Russia for many, many years, it's one of the reasons that the 2014 mind-on revolution happened is part because the corruption that was allowed to flourish under the Ukrainian oligarchs. And so I just wanna throw that out there that, you know, the problem of oligarchs, powerful politically collected businessmen are almost all men and their outsized roles in, you know, perverting the governance of a country like Russia or Ukraine is, I think is a longer-term problem that needs to be looked at. Yeah, and just, yeah, just kind of close and kind of two thoughts that come to mind. I mean, one, and this peels back on some of the conversation earlier about Putin that I just can't get Gaddafi out of my head, right? You know, isolated, dictating everybody, there's no clear successor, even with Gaddafi kind of had one, but not really. But either way, the point is when you have these kleptocratic oligarchic structures in states that we deal with or, you know, friends with, there was a sense in 2011 from the Gaddafi camp of betrayal that the US was suddenly imposing and leading the push to impose sanctions on him because he thought he was back in the international community after sanctions were lifted when he gave up his nuclear program. And so I think there's always gonna be that battle of, you know, how are you conveying Western values and that's a particular issue with Saudi Arabia and some of the other kind of Gulf states as well, that I'm not sure where we're gonna really solve fundamentally because politics are politics. The solution to all of this, and this is kind of the second thought, is this is why financial transparency matters. Because if you can push the transparency, you can at least set people on something of a level playing ground. Nobody actually knows how rich the Saudis are, the same way that nobody knows how rich poop is. You know, there aren't that many Saudis who appear on Forbes billionaires list and that's a bizarre kind of exclusion. But the financial transparency is key and I think it's fantastic that Secretary Yellen got a global agreement on the tax rate. That's really important. The global transparency, peace, you know, financial transparency should be kind of a similar level of effort for a Treasury secretary, whether that's Yellen or somebody else in the future. I think that's kind of how you start to chip away at some of the, at least the exorbitant privilege that these folks have and views too often. Yeah, I think that's a great point. Well, listen, we've come to time here. I wanna thank you guys for an excellent conversation. As always, you guys are just my favorites when it comes to these geeky things like sanctions and oligarchs. So we hope to have you again for those in our audience, just to remind you that this is the start of a long conversation we hope over the next few weeks in the installment of Aftershocks, our series next week, sorry, on Thursday, April 21st, we're going to discuss housing, land and property rights in war-torn Ukraine and how refugees can reclaim what they've left behind. There's a lot of losses there. You can find out more about the event by clicking on the button below and also following us at New America and at New Frontlines. We'll be announcing more about our program in the future. Thanks for joining.